In the fabrication of electrical circuits on semiconductor chips, processing variations often prevent the fabrication of components to the precision needed in large arrays. Those arrays use fusible elements in circuits to identify semiconductor chip types and in connection with redundant circuit elements to repair the arrays after fabrication by excluding bad elements and including substitute circuit elements. In chip identification circuits, the chip type is identified by the state of a plurality of the fusible elements where certain of the elements are blown to leave an open circuit while others are left conductive so that together fusible elements form a binary number that distinctively identifies the chip type. The binary number can then be read by applying voltage to the circuits containing each fusible element. Because of the above mentioned processing variations, circuit component differences make it very difficult for a detection circuit to detect whether a fuse circuit is open or conductive. Thus a chip whose part number is 010 could be misread as part number 011 due to the inability of the detection circuit to distinguish between an open and conductive fuse circuit for the least significant figure. Parity checking can be used to determine if an error has occurred in the case of the simple three bit binary number discussed above. However, in the reading out of a multicharacter chip identification number where each character is an 8 bit byte, multiple errors could require a sophisticated multiple error correcting system to locate and correct errors which in turn requires the use of valuable chip real estate. Further, the personalization of the fusible elements involves the use of high currents and voltages which could damage the detection circuits used in the detecting the state of the fusible elements and other circuits on the chip.